2016-2017 Senior Project - Virtual Computing Lab
A virtual computing lab (VCL) is being used in classes and courses at at least a few universities, including Drexel University. The codebase behind the project has accumulated a significant amount of technical debt, is quite limited in terms of its functionality and is difficult to operate as a software product.
We recognize that in the world of growing virtualization platforms and providers, where standardized cloud solutions and interfaces are developed, the academia could benefit from utilizing an open standard of computing resources to base its operations on. Therefore, we have chosen to implement VCL on top of the open-source and open-API OpenStack cloud.
We hope to be able to connect the needs of instructors and students with the features and capabilities offered by OpenStack-based clouds, whether self-hosted by academic institutions or public clouds available from commercial providers. This allows infrastructures operators and VCL installation owners to choose how they want to invest in the infrastructure and it gives them a one-click solution to outsource the whole infrastructure to a cloud provider of their choice.
